When the unimaginably profound literary dilettantes of the 22nd Century are praising the latest stunningly-packaged edition of Chris Szkl@ny’s “EasterWhen the unimaginably profound literary dilettantes of the 22nd Century are praising the latest stunningly-packaged edition of Chris Szkl@ny’s “Easter Funday” (as a free give-away promotional gimmick accompanying the latest stunningly packaged edition of The Books of Snakeyf@ck) a few might wisely remark the misfortunate that the masses placed no value on this clearly important work.

With a bit of luck and a swift kick in the ass to our own contemporary methods, we might be able to save Verne’s classic work the same fate. Everyone should read this book, and I mean everyone. What isn’t there to like in this timeless tale? Adventure: Check! Humor: Check! A dash of enlightenment: Check! There’s even some insults thrown the way of the French by a Frenchman. Unthinkable; and for that, this can only receive highest marks.

So, with the coda of the Civil War having been played, and normalcy set to return to the recently-troubled Union, the esteemed upper echelon of the venerable Baltimore Gun Club (and the accolades of the fine, former-warriors within are indeed vast and sometimes comedic) is having some difficulty in deciding how they are going to continue their industry, which is the invention and practical use of larger and more devastating artillery. Naturally, the sensible idea is to find some sort of war to join or provoke, be it domestic or foreign (from neighboring Mexico to anywhere in Europe a stint of jacking around might be afoot). With unknown consideration to preserving the remaining limbs of his fellows, Gun Club President Impey Barbicane decrees that they have a serious effort to embark upon which somehow trumps the majesty of slaughtering 200 hicks from Kentucky with one enormous projectile: the BGC is going to explore the vastness of space by using their unlimited technical knowledge of ballistics to launch something to the moon, extending our planet’s peaceful intentions by delivering a 20,000-pound cannonball to the lunar surface at thousands of miles per hour.

At this point, it’s already promising; these dudes do not f@ck around, and rightfully so, in the company of the maniacal and utterly preposterous J.T. Maston, perchance one of the legitimately funniest characters in all of literature.

Naturally, problems come and go, obstacles which would be insurmountable to most are easily dismissed by their lauded American industrial and engineering wit, leaving behind a trail of devastation that has Texas and Florida nearly to the point of war (in an uncannily academically accurate portrayal of their vying for the USA’s space exploration home base and the reason for it), other countries applauding their valiant efforts and encouraging them with charitable donations, and a bitter armorer from the civil war out to undo their credibility and expose them for frauds. The stakes are raised considerably when Michel Arden, a hellraising, French performer of nearly miraculous stunts, demands that the plans be altered to change the projectile into a capsule for him to make the journey in. The world at large, held constantly captive by all the events relating to this extraordinary event, can no longer control their zeal and begin flocking around the construction site to witness the casting of the 900-foot cannon, the acquisition of 300,000 pounds of guncotton, and the arrival of the unhinged occupant. In perhaps the strangest of all the predictions given to the advancement of space exploration and the human condition, perhaps the most stunning is that Verne accurately declares that Tallahassee will become a laughingstock of a city amongst an array of real metropolises.

*Note: It’s needless to mention that giving two products of France my own seal of meritorious work in a year’s time is painful. In this circumstance, my ego had to take a back seat to brutal honesty. ...more

I’m fully aware that I often need a good, swift kick in the ass, but seldom do I realize it so fully when I state that I treasure my time living thisI’m fully aware that I often need a good, swift kick in the ass, but seldom do I realize it so fully when I state that I treasure my time living this humdrum life above anything else on this planet, and proceed to squander it by reading something like Harlan Coben’s Hold Tight. Worse yet, I’ve got no one to blame but myself; I often reassure myself that a bad recommendation was someone else’s mistake, or a book endowed with awards and acclaim should have been better, and I was merely duped. This one was entirely my call, and I’ve got no excuses.

Adam Baye is a typical teenager, he’s generally a good kid that loves his family and playing on the school hockey team, but isn’t totally without his faults; he might occasionally skip a trig class to finger-pop that pimply girl with a low self-esteem who’ll do anything for a smidgen of acceptance, he might steal a few of mom’s Xanax to assist in his quest to get whack while chugging 40’s with his peeps, he’s cut in line at the cinema, and rumor has it that he once kicked a puppy. After the suicide of his best friend Spencer, Adam’s folks notice that he’s become increasingly withdrawn and behaving off kilter, and unable to effectively communicate with the kid in his time of duress, they decide to put spyware on his computer in the hopes this will give them a glimpse into what’s happening to their son. Mike Baye, Adam’s father and an accomplished surgeon, is against the idea, but his wife Tia eventually talks him into it, citing that it’s his responsibility as a father to protect his family and this is sadly part of the deal at this junction. Initially, their shady program uncovers distressing habits they would expect but are still a little uncomfortable having confirmed; the kid’s jacking off to bukkake videos, he’s pirated some Matchbox 20 songs (why, Lord, why?), and he’s friends with me on goodreads. These minor errs in judgment are completely cast aside when some of his IM conversations begin getting cryptic and seem to suggest their son might be getting involved in something a tad too dangerous and potentially illegal along with the son of the neighborhood cop, always a bad sign as those kids end up either total punks or policeman themselves, an undesirable fate either way. Concurrently, Spencer’s grief-stricken mother is playing Sherlock Holmes from home between snifters of cooking sherry and has come across some pretty solid evidence establishing that her son wasn’t alone on the night he allegedly committed suicide. When she presents this to the Baye’s, there’s no longer a doubt that something rotten is afoot.

As if this isn’t enough white-knuckle action, there are a few other storylines running through this clunker. A maniac named Nash is on a killing spree, and also menacing the local dive-bar denizens with his theory that if the bible is factual, than Adam and Eve’s children were either incestuous or monkey-fuckers to kick-start the human population. This absurdity provides an invitation for the inclusion of a wily female investigator, Loren Muse, following these irrational crimes and her valiant struggles to obtain and maintain respect in her nepotist precinct which refuses to take her seriously based solely on her gender. One of the Baye’s neighbor’s, a well-meaning-but-oft-shat-upon dude and his hairy, outcast daughter (befriended only by the Baye’s daughter, Jill, showing how prudently the focal family has imparted the concept of ‘seeing beneath the surface’ as their parental teachings) are used mainly as filler until their deeper involvement is uncovered. Lastly, Tia Baye is about as minor a major character as you can have, and while not acting as a privacy-invading tyrant at home, she’s a paralegal or something (I have no idea what a paralegal actually does) for an established ball-busting bitch who is finally giving Tia an opportunity to advance her career as her family begins falling apart. While the last does somewhat flesh out Tia’s character, the storyline itself is a failure from the start, as I wasn’t expecting the wife of a transplant surgeon to be hard up enough for employment to completely disregard her family in dire straits.

All of these elements eventually converge to form the sort of hokey climax which can be expected of the typical NY Times Bestseller in this day and age.

Now, nobody has actually approached me demanding an explanation for why I bothered to read this, but I really wish they would, as I’ve already got my alibi worked out, so I figure it would be a shame not to share it. I’d seen this book on the best-seller rack at the grocery store a few times, and actually managed to avoid giving in to the temptation of paying $9.99 for it. This was mainly because I couldn’t possibly justify spending ten bucks on a paperback. And even though I’ve recently been given some very sound advice from a fellow goodreader “if you wouldn’t buy it a cover price don’t buy it on sale” I hadn’t been clued in to this wisdom when I read Hold Tight and was ecstatic to save $9.49 by picking it up used. What had me intrigued was the whole spyware angle, I was totally sold on a story which vilifies this practice and exposes this software as the devil’s work. This is because my crazy girlfriend has spyware on this very computer, some shit called Specter Pro and a ‘keylogger’, which might be one and the same program, I’m unfortunately about a tenth as computer savvy as she is and I’m not really sure. This has proved to be somewhat inconvenient for a former scoundrel such as myself, and also seems a bit unfair seeing as this is a pretty one-sided deal, as I have no such methods of gathering intelligence on her activity. Now, I should probably confess that I’ve done things in the past which certainly tarnish my standing as a mate, and that a little heightened surveillance is probably warranted, but where this logic fails is assuming that it’s happening on the computer, as none of my actual wrongdoings involved email or instant messaging. What the hell am I going to do, talk all raw and nasty to someone and hump the floppy drive? Even if I did, is that so wrong, hell, that’s a shameful egg on my face, sister. In spite of years of walking the straight and narrow, the stigma lingers, and the Specter Pro remains, utilizing copious amounts of the computer’s memory/RAM stuff and causing it to run slower than a Biggest Loser contestant with diarrhea.

Everyone I’ve related this story to has asked why I put up with it. And that’s a pretty good question, isn’t trust supposed to be an integral part of a healthy relationship? At the same time, I also seem to see the sense in her assertion that if I have nothing to hide, what’s the big deal? These two points of view have proved irreconcilable over the years, and needless to say, my desire for continued intercourse with her has trumped my moral standings on the issue. Also, I do have to say that if there was anything of a computer-related nature which could have resulted in my behaving badly, constant fear of Big Brother keeps me in line (even though I’m still routinely bitched out at for things, which never ceases to amaze me, such as accepting a Facebook friend invitation from people I’ve never gotten my freak on with).

So, having firsthand experience as a tragic victim of the spyware epidemic begat by insecure significant others and paranoid parents the world over, I thought that I’d have some sort of commonality with this book making it more interesting, but unfortunately, none of my shenanigans were as remarkable as to involve teenage prescription drug abuse and a former black ops agent gone homicidal, only making me feel as if I’m not living my life to its fullest potential....more

Riddle me this…… why is it that Kafka is praised for having a continuous theme of ‘alienation and anxiety in a bizarre, hostile, and dehumanized worldRiddle me this…… why is it that Kafka is praised for having a continuous theme of ‘alienation and anxiety in a bizarre, hostile, and dehumanized world’ (taken right from the introduction by Kafka-aficionado Jason Baker) but Art Alexaksis of Everclear is constantly derided for never giving up the theme of his parent’s divorce and family instability in his suburban American life?

Really, who is more pigeonholed and obsessed with a single theme; a guy who puts a few 3-minute, 3-chord, hastily-written songs with the same motif on each of his albums, or a guy who spends his entire life churning out several volumes of written work with the same underlying theme throughout? I’ll let a wiser man than myself be the judge of that. Let’s face it, pretty much anyone involved in any form of ‘art’ is pretty much always magnetically drawn to some persistent theme which they probably feel defines them and their struggles in this mortal coil. Everclear and Kafka just happen to exceed at staying as close to home without straying from their designated bounds; note to Kafka and his slavishly obedient idolaters, being the Everclear of literature doesn’t justify being considered one of the most influential wordsmiths in human history. All the stories within pretty much blow; here are some comments on the tiny tales that blow the most:

•“A Message From the Emperor” – How this can claim to be ‘published’ (in 1919) is quite beyond my feeble understanding; this concise tale is basically the length of a paragraph in an HP Lovecraft story. No sh-t. Exactly one-trade-paperback-page long. How this can be called a ‘story’ is even less understood. This editioni was created by Barnes & Nobles, and for them to choose this as their readers’ first taste of Kafka is quite perplexing.

•The Metamorphosis – For all of the acclaim surrounding this story, it’s far-flung appeal is lost on me. Let’s cut to the chase; the protagonist, a lame-ass named Gregor, can’t go to work one fine morning due to his transmogrification into some form of insect (what exact classification of insect is shrouded in mystery, the literary quandary equivalent to the smirk on the Mona Lisa). His family detains him into his room and then treats him like shit. I wouldn’t so much consider this treatment 'alienation’ as I would common sense; I personally won’t dine at the dinner table with a giant cicada, relative or not. Boring story with intermittent vestiges of near-human/insect-incest. I don’t have any idea what the statement behind this fabled work is; Gregor apparently supports this lazy ass family of his until his turn of fate, and when left to fend for themselves they get real lives and jobs and move on happily.

•“The Judgment” – Regrettable. One of the most pointless pieces of smegma I’ve perused in my days. Too much build-up for too little of interest.

•“Josephine The Singer, Or The Mouse People” – While the story sucks, let me quote some stupidity from within: “It is truly no feat to crack a nut, and therefore no one would think to gather an audience for the purpose of entertaining them with nutcracking.” Obviously, this poor fool had no conception of what a thriving industry porn would become. Reading this story is akin to reading the same damn sentence over and over; a society of shitass rats is beset by the troubles of a social unit, Josephine, who believes she is a star, a unique mouse as opposed to some random and commonplace rodent. Sixteen pages concerning a varmint’s debated ability to sing (contrary to the rat’s universal ‘piping’), which considers both sides of the argument to confirm or deny her public appeal and whether this unclassifiable talent warrants privilege. Trust me, the tale of any human superstar’s life bores the tits off me, much less their rotten and pussified attitude, and reading the equivalent in the world of vermin is pretty piss poor. ...more